Developers of applications that support interactivity in environments that have restricted resources typically face many challenges. For example, with Microsoft Corporation's HDi™ interactivity technology, developers can facilitate advanced navigation and interaction with features and content (called “interactive content”) on platforms as diverse as video game consoles and mobile devices such as personal media players and phones. HDi applications are written using a mix of markup such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and script such as ECMAScript standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification, which can provide powerful and rich user experiences when engaging with interactive content and features. However, the development environment for HDi applications can be complex. HDi applications are typically developed in compliance with various restrictions and design rules that may be imposed due to platform and resource limitations, as well as those that may be associated with application portability or standardization, for example. Developers have to deal with time synchronicity of the interactive content using the markup and script while complying with restrictions on how many lines of code and XML elements may be used, how many pixels can be ready to draw onto a device display at a time, and so on.
Current validation tools having applicability to HDi application development will typically only validate the XML schema or verify the ECMAScript syntax. In addition, such post-authoring tools do not enable developers to interactively verify the correctness of their applications in a real-time manner (i.e., as the application code executes as in a runtime environment). Application developers may need to resort to trial and error which can lengthen the development cycle and add costs, or the developers may become overly conservative in their application design to avoid running afoul of the rules or restrictions.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.